“I thought I was Jack Kerouac when I was younger, so I just traveled all around and wrote and worked at bars,” says Steven Ives, who is preparing to open Kestrel Tavern in the old Dear Kingston space in Midtown Kingston, injecting 33 years of savings and experience into the project. “I’ve bartended in California and Oregon and Iowa and Florida and Colorado.” The Bronx-born Ives is busy knocking things off his bucket list lately—last fall he released his debut novel, Even After Always, and this fall, he’ll tick off another dream when he finally throws open the doors to his own bar.
“The idea, without being pretentious at all, is that you’re going to walk in here and it’s going to be sexy,” he says of Kestrel, which is aiming for a mid-October opening. “It’s going to sound good. It’s going to look good.” That said, Ives is not going for something over-polished and inaccessible. He maintains a humility and down-to-earth realism grounded in years of work. “My budget is the budget of a bartender who saved up his whole life,” he says, though he does have partners who helped purchase the building in May.
From Dear Kingston, Ives inherited a 14-tap draft system, which he plans to use to feature a constantly rotating “all-star team” of Hudson Valley craft beers and wine from Red Maple Vineyard. On the liquor side, he’ll offer commercial favorites like Jack Daniels and Tito’s while reserving the top shelf for local craft spirits. The in-house kitchen will offer minimal snacks like bar pretzels and paninis, though he plans to have a full-time, third-party food provider on-premises during opening hours all year-round. (Ives is working on closing a deal with an acclaimed local food truck; more details coming soon).
With the renovation and design of the space, Ives is incorporating feedback he received from prior Dear Kingston customers on areas for improvement, namely that it was too loud and too bright. “Outside of Tubby’s, which is specifically a music club, I’m getting probably the best sound system in the county,” he says. “I’m getting all new speakers that are going to be situated all over the place that have microphones in them to detect ambient noise and they adjust their volume. So this place is always going to sound really fucking good.” Soft, diffuse lighting will tone down the intensity that was another source of complaints.
The building, which previously housed a Red Cross office, sits on a large .25-acre adjacent to the Kingston Midtown Linear Park, making the bar easily accessible on foot or by bike. The enormous backyard features a back mural by local artist Sean Willett, who will also be painting the front of the building ahead of opening.
And the backyard, which previously had two straight rows of picnic tables (a look a friend of Ives dubbed “prison yard chic”), will be arranged in nooks of comfortable lawn chairs and other cozy hang out spots (including a furnished yurt) with a fresh layer of pea gravel and string lights. The back deck will get heat lamps for (near) year-round lounging.
“What I hope to do in the future is build a stage in the back and have outdoor theater,” Ives says. “I want to get together with theater groups to do something like Shakespeare in the Park, maybe get a projector and have movie nights, and have live music, hopefully something along the lines of jazz and folk.”
In the shorter term, he imagines lighter-production events like “Yappy Hour” for dogs and their owners, adoption days in collaboration with the ASPCA, and tasting pop-ups with breweries and distilleries. “If people want to do events, they have my space for it,” Ives says. “The backyard is a huge space. It’s daunting. I’m daunted.” In winter, he plans to rope off part of the backyard and bring the food truck closer to the back deck for a more intimate vibe.
The bar is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Ives. While he originally looked in his native New York City, the competitive lease market drove him out and he began looking upstate, almost renting the Broadway space that now houses Tortilla Taco bar eight years ago. “I’ve looked at places in Red Hook, Beacon, New Paltz, just all over,” he says. “I love this area, and it’s very close to my family and friends.” Then in 2024, old friends and industry colleagues Rebecca Kush and Tiffany Themens opened Night Swim in the old Anchor spot, adding to the draw of Kingston. They connected Ives with Davina Thomasula, a realtor and part owner of both Goodnight Kenny and Sorry Charlie bars, who eventually found him the Dear Kingston space.
“I’m lucky—I’ve had a lot of good people escort me through this so that it was not entirely new,” Ives says. “It’s still intimidating—I’m not a businessman, I’m a bar guy. But I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends and connections. My web guy is a guy that lives in Rockland County that’s been a friend of mine for over 20 years. My dad, who is an architect, did the plans and the logo.”
The upstairs of the two-story building is in the process of being converted into an apartment, and when that renovation is complete, attention will shift gears to finish the bar buildout.
“I’ll be bartending here, not shouting orders” Ives says. “I don’t ever want anyone to feel like they’re working for me. I want everyone to be working with each other. It’s not my bar, because the minute you build a bar, it belongs to Kingston. I want everything to be an us thing. I think that’s a better way to live.” Cheers to that.
This article appears in September 2025.
